Yesterday I put up my twitter mosaic so you could admire all of those beautiful people who I follow. Now there are some people on there who I shouldn’t be following because I started using Twitter a long time ago and used something called autofollow. One word, Don’t. It allows spammers to send you rubbish all the time. Social media is now the best way to get up to date with relevant information about what you are interested in. If you are reading this you should be interested in Spain because you have an interest in coming here.
I live here and I follow my market and keep on top of what is going on so that if anyone asks me a question I can answer it from a position of knowledge rather than guesswork. I use various tools to do this, one of which is the rather wonderful Google Reader (If used right) but another is Twitter.
When you go to www.twitter.com it seems a rather empty thing. You sign up and nothing happens. It all depends what you are doing with it. In order to do something with it you need to get inside it. To get inside it you need tools rather than just Twitter itself. Personally I use Tweetdeck to follow and send messages and Google Reader to follow RSS feeds on terms mentioned in Twitter. Let me explain more.
Let’s say you are interested in Valencia where I am. You can set up a Twitter Search here. It looks like this.
Valencia Twitter Search
Now the actual results here if you can see them, are nothing to write home about. There are flights to Valencia, Valencia in the States and other Valencia stuff in Spanish. You probably wouldn’t want to scroll down go onto page two etc… etc … etc… So you need to use the little orange icon in the top right corner. That is an RSS feed. This page has one for example. When you click on it it will give you the option to follow in Google reader. Google Reader is brilliant because you can have one line summaries of everything and check every mention of Valencia on Twitter since the last time you looked with links to articles, pictures and loads more. (Just hope that Antonio Valencia doesn’t have a good season at Manchester United. The day he signed was hell as sifting through everyone Twittering about it was awful)
Why do you want to know this information? Well you will find absolute gold there including property for sale in Valencia, stories about great days out, pictures of places you will want to visit and people to follow in Twitter who will give you much more information by following their tweets and also you can engage in discussion with them to get more info about the place, in other words you have somebody on the ground who can give you the background of the place.
Here is the RSS feed for me in Google reader about Valencia.
Valencia in Twitter on Google Reader
Remember you can do this for any term but let us stick to Valencia.
The Download Page For tweetdeck
On Tweetdeck you can organise your contacts you find into columns so that you don’t miss what they say. You could follow me for example on @grahunt or the more business based tweets on @valprop and you would be flooded with info about Valencia and Spain as I use the quite brilliant Posterous service to post news that will be interesting to anyone who is thinking of coming to Spain. (My Posterous blog of interesting stuff can be found here. At times there is stuff not related to Spain too) You could put everyone you follow in Valencia into a single column to separate them from family and friends for example just like you do in Facebook maybe.
So do you now get why I place such a huge importance on Twitter? It is real time and gets you the info about just about any subject you want right now. Compare it with the search engines like Google which will find you the most relevant websites about your search term. However the information on those websites might well be years old in many cases. Twitter is more immediate.
Get yourself on Twitter and blog about your impending move to Spain and I will find you and follow (I will then of course hope to sell you a house because you will trust me due to the fact that I have given you so much great information)
Read Some More in These Related Post. Number 1 Is Very Important if You Really Want to Know More.
